


You were a vision in the morning when the light came through

by ADyingFlower



Series: I'm only doing this because I love you [9]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Borderline Personality Disorder, Choking, Dark Keith (Voltron), Domestic Fluff, Lima Syndrome, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Power Dynamics, References to Depression, Stockholm Syndrome, Symbolism, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-01
Updated: 2019-07-01
Packaged: 2020-06-02 05:32:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19434925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ADyingFlower/pseuds/ADyingFlower
Summary: When they step outside, Lance tilts his head back, closing his eyes as the smell of an incoming storm wraps around both of them. His bare feet softly pad down the steps and onto the clay like dirt, just as the first raindrops hit his skin.He can only watch from the porch as Lance spreads his arms, welcoming the incoming storm, his bright presence stark against his dull surroundings. Even after months of living with him, Lance never quite seems to fit in, too bright, too untouchable for anyone to quite grasp.Like a star on Earth. Or rain in the desert.Lance spins, lazily at first, but quickly gaining momentum. He’s dancing - bare feet skidding against the muddy dirt and Keith’s borrowed clothing quickly becoming soaked through. The monsoon rages violently throughout the Sonoran Desert, but yet Lance dances like it’s his father’s radio.His hair sticks to his brow, and mud splashes up against his calves, but yet this might be the most beautiful Keith has ever seen him.(As summer crawls to an end, Keith comes to several realizations about himself, the past, and his relationship with Lance)





	You were a vision in the morning when the light came through

**Author's Note:**

> 9/12

“ _Keith_!” 

The scream breaks the silence of the desert, and he doesn’t hesitate in dropping the shovel right on top of the brand new tomato plants before sprinting towards the house. 

“What’s wrong?!” Keith hurriedly unlocks the door, swinging it open as his heart threatens to beat out of his chest. “Are you okay? Are you hurt at all?” 

Some of the tension melts out of him when he sees that Lance is just standing on top of the kitchen table, perfectly fine but shushing him with a finger against his lips. 

“Help,” Lance pleads, pointing towards the floor. 

The baby scorpion waddles by. 

He can’t help it. Keith snorts, loudly, trying to cover his snickers with his hand. 

“Seriously?” He asks, raising an eyebrow. “You’re scared of _that_?”

“I have a completely valid reason to be rightfully terrified of something that can kill me!” Lance shrieks, waving frantically at the baby scorpion. He jumps a little bit when the scorpion takes two teeny tiny steps in his direction, looking ready to cringe right out of his body.

In response, Keith takes one of Lance’s thicker books from the bookshelf, walks over to the scorpion, and drops the heavy cover right on top of it.

“Oh,” Lance says, both of them staring at the squished mess on the floor. “Well, that works too, I suppose.” 

Keith laughs, shaking his head. “You’re adorable, you know that?” 

Lance puffs up his cheeks, pouting as Keith walks towards the table and offers a hand for him to get down. 

Except, when Lance’s piano fingers curl around his, he _pulls_ , laughing as Lance falls into his arms with a small scream. 

Spinning around with the teenager in his arms, Lance’s arms twine around his neck, shrieking in exhilaration as Keith spins round and round and round, falling against their bed giggling. 

“You crazy,” Lance pants. “Son of a bitch.”

He can’t resist. Leaning over, he plops a wet kiss right on his mouth, smiling almost ear from ear. For a moment, Lance tenses under his hands, but after a moment he forcibly relaxes, going limp underneath him.

It’s hard, but he knows he has to draw it back. Calm down, you’re almost there Keith.

Licking his lips, he sits back up, glancing around the room for some kind of inspiration to keep the cheerful mood up. 

There!

Bouncing to his feet, he pulls Lance to his feet, both of them laughing as they stumble onto the wooden floors. His father’s old radio is an easy reach, and Lance lets out another adorable giggle as the pop music starts blasting. 

“Oh man, I’ve never heard this song before!” Lance shouts over the music, swinging their hands in between them. Keith lifts his arm up to spin him, and Lance twirls with another loud laugh. 

This time, Lance kisses him. Keith smiles against his lover’s mouth, running his nails against Lance’s scalp even as the teenager continues to bop his head to the beat. They separate for a moment, catching their breath as the radio blares out its catchy tunes before Keith dives back in, pressing the entire curve of his body against his sweetheart’s. 

Lance breaks the kiss with a somewhat forced laugh when it becomes a little too hot and heavy. “Down boy.” 

Keith playfully scowls, but he bops his nose gently against Lance’s regardless, letting him know he's not actually angry. 

His sweetheart steps out of his touch - where are you going, love? - and casts a glance outside the window. His eyebrows furrow, and he steps to the beat of the music towards the nailed down window leading to the front porch, pulling back the curtain to get a better look at something outside. 

“What is it?” He demands, quickly shutting off the radio with his other hand reaching for his mother’s knife he always carries with him. Is it someone else stupid enough to wander near their home? Someone else he has to get rid of, now, before they could take away what belongs to him?

Except - 

“Clouds.” Lance murmurs, his hand tightening on the curtain. He whirs around, his eyes lighting up as he smiles in a way Keith’s never seen before. “Clouds, Keith!”

Clouds. Rain. 

Keith calms himself down, hand falling away from his lower back in order to step up next to his lover and soothingly stroke down Lance’s spine, smirking a little bit as Lance shudders, his ears turning red. Sure enough, there are storm clouds churning in the distance, dark and ominous .

“Damn if I’d be.” Keith shakes his head. “Monsoon clouds. Better get everything inside before the wind blows it away.” 

Lance’s eyes go wide. “Monsoon…” He says, traces of a smile still clinging to the corners of his mouth. 

“Wait right here,” he orders the boy, Lance obediently backing up to the far wall as he’s supposed to do whenever Keith goes out the front door. “I’ll be right back.”

“I’ll be here,” Lance says wryly, the unspoken _not like I can go anywhere else_ loud and clear, and Keith snorts. 

-

After locking up the greenhouse and putting the rocking chair in the tool shed, Keith unlocks the front door with a weary eye. 

To his unending relief, Lance is still there, the damn cat in his lap and a distant look in his eyes as he watches the sky. 

“Honey, I’m home.” Keith says quietly, and Lance breaks out of his stupor to smile at Keith. 

And as every time before it, Keith feels his heart seize uncomfortably in his chest. A good kind of pain, the kind he’s addicted to. Tilting his head, he locks the door behind him, slipping the keys into his pocket and sitting down next to Lance on their bed. 

It’s silence for several long moments. Lance breathes in sharply. 

“In Cuba,” he begins, melodic voice telling the story like the ocean’s waves cresting against the sand. “During the rainy season, there would be storms like no tomorrow. Papi would call them thunder boomers, and Marco was the only one who could sleep through them…”

Keith closes his eyes, and listens to the story of the youngest sibling from a poor family in Cuba. Of dancing in the rain with his sisters and jumping in every puddle on the way home from school, of the faint musical sounds of Spanish and laughing with his pants rolled up and shoes held in his hands as he shrieks at the ocean’s salty spray. 

Slowly, he opens them as Lance goes on to tell him about the time the rain ruined an art project of his he left to dry, homesickness evident in his voice. 

He tries to imagine it, a young Lance, without the weight of depression and adulthood hanging over his head. How carefree he must have been… 

“Want to go outside?” He asks without even thinking. 

Lance freezes mid sentence, his head whipping around to stare at Keith in open shock. He meets his gaze evenly, not breaking eye contact. 

His sweetheart’s mouth trembles. “Could I?” 

Keith nods his head. Lance just stares for a long moment, his hand paused mid-pet on Blue’s back. Even the cat seems to be watching him, two sets of ocean eyes watching him with disbelief and something like hope. 

He swallows. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.”

And he offers out his hand for Keith to take. 

Keith takes it. Gently, reverently, as everything he’s ever wanted gently scoots the cat off his lap and stands up next to him. 

When they step outside, Lance tilts his head back, closing his eyes as the smell of an incoming storm wraps around both of them. His bare feet softly pad down the steps and onto the clay like dirt, just as the first raindrops hit his skin. 

He can only watch from the porch as Lance spreads his arms, welcoming the incoming storm, his bright presence stark against his dull surroundings. Even after months of living with him, Lance never quite seems to fit in, too bright, too untouchable for anyone to quite grasp. 

Like a star on Earth. Or rain in the desert. 

Lance spins, lazily at first, but quickly gaining momentum. He’s dancing - bare feet skidding against the muddy dirt and Keith’s borrowed clothing quickly becoming soaked through. The monsoon rages violently throughout the Sonoran Desert, but yet Lance dances like it’s his father’s radio. 

His hair sticks to his brow, and mud splashes up against his calves, but yet this might be the most beautiful Keith has ever seen him. 

As if sensing his gaze, Lance stops spinning to beam up at him, one hand out in offering. 

Keith, regardless of the mud and rain, steps out into the open and takes it. 

Yelping, he’s unprepared for Lance to _yank,_ sending them colliding and spiraling down to the ground. Lance twines his arms behind Keith’s neck, grinning smugly up at him. 

“Caught you~” He hums proudly, water droplets clinging to his eyelashes. 

Keith can feel the rain hitting the back of his head, the warm water plastering his hair to the back of his neck. His shirt and shorts are starting to cling uncomfortably, but he can’t bring himself to care when he leans down and slides his lips along Lance’s. 

He’s on top, he’s the one who has Lance sheltered underneath him, but yet, as Lance tugs his head down, he feels like for the first time, Lance has all the power here. 

Lance breaks their kiss to playfully bite his bottom lip, watching him with an unreadable expression. “Dance with me,” he says - no, he commands. 

And, unable to disobey, Keith gets to his feet and dances with him. 

-

The two of them laugh breathlessly as they stumble into the bathroom, dripping water throughout the house and sopping wet clothes being dropped to the ground in their wake. Without even thinking about it, Keith turns the tab for hot on, letting the water pour into the bathtub.

Glancing behind him, Keith pauses at Lance’s too pale face, those blue eyes of his fixed on the water quickly rising higher. “You okay?”

Lance startles, looking a little uncertain as some of the confidence the rain gave him slowly melts away. He shakily nods his head, hands fumbling on the end of his soaked shirt. 

Keith steps forward, easily batting his hands away. “Let me?” It’s both a question and a plea, and Lance’s hands fall away to his sides. 

He undresses the younger boy, hands tenderly caressing the bare skin slowly being revealed to him. Lance’s stomach twitches when he fans out his fingers on his lower stomach, slowly sliding his palm up Lance’s torso until it wraps in a loose hold around his neck. 

Lance watches him, his gaze unreadable. Keith slowly tightens his grip, yet the only thing his sweetheart does is pitch his head back, his hooded eyes staring right back at him. 

For a moment, he thinks of glass shards and an unlocked front door. Lance chokes out a little gasp as Keith doesn’t let up, but his hands still stay by his side, passive and open as Keith steps forwards and flattens their front together. 

“If you ever try to leave me again, I’ll kill you.” He growls out. 

His grip tightens. “Understood?”

Lance just smiles. And for the life of him, Keith can’t read him. 

He lets go. 

Lance draws in a shuddering gasp, immediately rubbing his abused neck. Tomorrow morning, he’ll probably be wearing a blue necklace, yet the thought doesn’t bring him as much joy as he once thought it would. 

Soft. He’s gone soft. 

It’s not a bad look on him, he supposes. 

Turning around, he shuts off the tap water. “You want to put anything else in?” He idly asks, running his hands through the hot water. Hotter than he would prefer, but it would do good to warm both of them up. 

Lance doesn’t say anything, but there’s the sound of soft footsteps, and then rusting as Lance rummages through the newly installed shelves he bought just for this use, eventually returning with a red bath bomb Keith completely forgot he even bought. Leaning over his shoulder, Lance drops the sphere into the water, both of them watching it dissolve with the faint scent of cherries. 

To his surprise, Lance tugs on the hem of his shirt from behind, silently urging him to undress. Keith complies, tearing off his shirt and casually kicking it away. Lance smiles into the skin of his shoulder, looping his arms around his waist as the two of them watch the red slowly seep into the rest of the water and dye it in its colors. 

It’s easy to forget, sometimes, that Lance is taller than him. 

After a couple moments, he tips his head towards Lance, lips inches apart. “Want to get in?”

Shallowly, Lance nods, following his lead into the water only after shucking off their shorts and underwear. Lance settles in between his legs, pointedly ignoring Keith’s shudder at all of Lance’s bare skin touching his. 

God, he’s already getting hard, just from Lance sitting in front of him, those mile long legs stretching out in the water and knocking against the porcelain sides. That intoxicating scent, if he just leans forward… 

“Shit!” He totally doesn’t squeal, wincing sharply as Lance digs his _very_ long nails into the sensitive skin of his inner thigh, very close to a certain area of his that is rapidly losing interest as Lance pinches harshly. 

“No.” Is all Lance says, voice hoarse from the earlier choking, and Keith is already throwing his hands up, yelping, “Okay! Okay, just let go!” 

Lance huffs, smiling a little bit as he releases Keith’s abused skin. “Teach you,” he mutters, sinking down so his head rests against Keith’s chest, his knees popping adorably out of the water. 

Keith contents himself for several long moments just soaking in the tub, closing his eyes and running his hands through Lance’s tangled hair. Lance hums, running his palm up and down Keith’s leg in a way that for once wasn’t sexual, but intimate. 

They sit like that, for what must be minutes, could be hours. The warmth of the bathwater and Lance’s silent presence melts the ice in his veins, until he can his feel tension unwind like the chords of a violin wrapped around the pegbox, being cut one by one. 

It’s why he’s unprepared, from one moment to the other, for Lance to ask, “Why did you kill him?”

He opens his mouth, ready to excuse it away with how he was trying to take Lance away, but thought better of it. 

Why did he kill Griffin? 

“I…” He pauses. “I think I was scared. Scared - and then angry. I don’t have any reason to live in a world without you in it. And he was there, but so were you.” Shuddering, he draws Lance closer to his chest, kissing his hair silently. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

It’s - an apology and it isn’t. He’s sorry Lance had to see him, see Griffin like that. If he had the time, he would have tucked Lance away, somewhere dark and small where Lance couldn’t escape or see anything. 

But he’s not sorry for killing Griffin. 

Griffin saw Lance - he knew Keith had kidnapped him. There was no other way to preserve the peace he’s founded here. 

Lance peeks up at him, something sardonic in the curve of his lips as the two of them consider each other. “Then,” he says, voice gravelly. “I’m sorry for hurting you when I ran away.” 

It’s not an apology for escaping, nor is it a promise not to do it again. But it’s something - and it’s sincere. 

Keith grimaces. “I can’t lose you, love. I can’t.” 

Lance’s eyes roll away from him, staring at some spot at the wall instead. “I know.” He says, quiet and obedient as he always does whenever Keith confesses his feelings toward him. 

But this time, he wants something to change. 

“I’m sorry ruining your dreams,” he confesses instead, sincere, because he _is_ sorry. Lance’s passion and zealousness for space always amazed him, always made him wistful for the days where he had the same wishes and dreams.

Lance’s blank look breaks, and he looks up at Keith in surprise. 

Then - 

“I’m sorry for punching you.”

“I’m sorry for gagging you.” 

“I’m sorry for not eating.”

“I’m sorry for threatening to cut off your fingers.”

“I’m sorry for what happened to your dad.”

Keith inhales sharply, blinking back bittersweet tears. “Thanks.” He whispers. “I’m sorry for taking you away from your family.” 

“Hmm, yeah that one’s hard.” Lance snorts. “I’m sorry for your medications.” 

Ah, he found out about it. It’s not like Keith tried hard to hide his old prescriptions, and Lance is a lot smarter than most people give him credit for. 

Most people, not including him of course. 

“Lamictal for the mood swings,” he starts to recall slowly, voice monotone. “Risperdal for the anxiety. Abilify for paranoia. Zyprexa for the anger.” He tucks his nose against Lance’s hair. “I didn’t need them - I’m not sick.”

Lance frown, like he wants to argue. “Taking medications isn’t bad. I took antidepressants, but I’m assuming you already know that, oh stalker of mine.”

Despite himself, Keith laughs. “You got me there.” He could never consider his perfect Lance sick - his brain just didn’t like to work, sometimes. Narrowing his eyes, he considers Lance’s look, slowly coming to his own realization. “You want me to go back on them.”

His sweetheart soothingly pats his knee. “Not all of them, if you don’t want to. Just - try.” 

Keith can never say no to him. “Fine, but I’ll try to get you some antidepressants while I’m at it, got it?” 

Lance purses his lips, but he nods. With that conservation over, Lance turns around in the bathtub to fully face him, pushing himself up to his knees to hover over him. 

Blood like bathwater falls from him, sliding down his naked torso, yet his ocean eyes stay firmly fixed on Keith. His hands curl around the rim of the tub, tilting his head to consider Keith with an indifferent stare. 

He's stunning.

“God,” Keith murmurs, his hands already coming up to grip Lance’s hips. “You’ll be the death of me.”

Lance shifts his hands to Keith’s shoulders, curling them almost delicately behind Keith’s neck. “Then kill me.” He says simply. 

Keith wishes he could. He really wishes he could, but now, as he climbs to his own knees to mirror Lance, he has to admit the truth. 

He can’t kill him. He was a fool for thinking he could. 

_Even if it means losing him?_ A part of him asks himself, but - 

He doesn’t know. 

Lance watches him through lowered eyes as Keith tilts him back, pulling and pushing until Lance’s back is nearly touching the bloody water. Keith pulls the boy's knees over him, keeping him balanced with a hand splayed possessively over his lower back. 

There’s something like fear in those eyes. It takes him a moment to realize why, and when he does, Keith feels a stab of self hatred. 

“I won’t let you drown.” He promises. 

Lance bites his lip. Slowly, his tight grip on Keith’s shoulders loosens, mouth parting to let Keith kiss him.

He relaxes, trusting Keith not to let go, not to let him drown. 

Keith doesn’t let him go. He never does. 

**Author's Note:**

> Next: Greenhouse


End file.
